Category Archives: United States

Donald Trump, Government, Politics, Society, United States

The 58th presidency of the United States looms

UNITED STATES

donald-trump

President-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated on January 20, 2017, at the United States Capitol.

Intro: Donald Trump now needs to be presidential. From January 20, what he says and how he acts will soon no longer be a preamble or rehearsal in garnering support.

DONALD TRUMP made some extraordinary pronouncements during the U.S. election campaign. Alongside his current Twitter feed, one which gives insight into his thinking and intentions, Americans will be awaiting his anointment as president with a mounting sense of either delight or dread.

The Trump show will shortly begin. As the most powerful man in the world he will be under the spotlight as never before, holding centre stage, with everyone watching. From January 20, what he says and how he acts will soon no longer be a preamble or rehearsal in garnering support.

Following the announcement in November of his election victory, the president-elect gave a surprising reaction after meeting the man he will replace at the White House.

He spoke of his “great respect” for Mr Obama and said he very much looked forward to taking his counsel in the future.

Fine words, and we should hope they are true. Mr Trump would do well, too, to pay equal deference to the US’s top intelligence officials who have briefed him over Russia’s interference in the presidential election.

Many observers, not just in America, but elsewhere, will have reacted with dismay and disbelief to Mr Trump’s previous attempts to rubbish the case as a political witch hunt by people smarting from being “beaten very badly” in the election. If this is a sign to come, Mr Trump needs to battle against his own instincts.

Being president is entirely different from being a presidential candidate, when the objective – as we have clearly seen – is to discredit your opponents and come out on top.

The Oval Office is all about nurturing allies and building alliances. Whilst the Republicans will hold more of the cards than the Democrats did under the current administration, a position in which Mr Trump is likely to get all his policies enacted, he will soon find out that no one person can do it all.

The new White House communications director Sean Spicer has pledged that the incoming president will listen to intelligence briefings with a “100 per cent” open mind. We trust that will be the case. Mr Spicer implicitly stated that Donald Trump would be prepared to listen and understand how the intelligence services reached their conclusions. He also stressed that a rush to judgment was not in the US’s best interest.

Many will hope that the president-to-be will also take that counsel. Standing up against the establishment and the political machine during the election campaign is one thing, which might win a few votes from the disaffected; but, as president – or more importantly commander in chief – Mr Trump is going to have to work with these people.

Trust will need to go both ways. Otherwise the world will undoubtedly become a more dangerous place.

There have already been many questions over Mr Trump’s relationship with Russia, no more so than the business interests he and other members of his government have there. There is expectation that Mr Trump will do things no previous president has done.

But, he must also understand there are things he has to do and ways he has to act. Mr Trump will have many advisers, though many will wonder whether he can take their advice on important matters of the state.

As global insecurity increases, Mr Trump cannot be allowed to be a loose cannon.

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Arts, Government, Politics, Russia, Society, Technology, United States

The terrifying era of internet warfare

CYBER WARS

russian-hackers

America’s CIA says Vladimir Putin was behind Russian hackers’ bid to swing the U.S. presidential election. As the fallout continues, cyber wars are only at the infancy stage of the internet-war era.

SINCE the presidential election result was announced in November, America has become an embittered battlefield. The role of Russia in securing Donald Trump’s victory has caused fierce controversy.

The CIA, America’s intelligence agency, has asserted with “high confidence” that Kremlin-directed hackers were responsible for the revelation through Wikileaks of thousands of Democratic Party emails, derailing the Hillary Clinton campaign wagon just at a crucial moment during the election when Trump was in trouble over his misogynistic attitudes and appalling treatment of women.

In sensational developments last month, intelligence officials said that Russia’s President Putin was personally involved in the hacking campaign.

If that was not enough to spark intense unease in Western capitals, a spokesperson for President Obama launched an extraordinary attack on Mr Trump, saying that it was “obvious” he knew about the Russian interference in the election.

The President-elect dismisses as “ridiculous” the charges that the Russians helped to place him, their avowed friend, in the White House. Few even among his foes suggest that he won solely thanks to the hackers. But the 2016 U.S. election has highlighted the extraordinary influence now wielded by the internet upon every aspect of our world.

The former U.S. Secretary of State, Dr Henry Kissinger, wrote presciently in his 2014 book World Order: ‘Presidential elections are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the internet . . . whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction.’

What is most chilling, however, is the speed with which cyber conflict is now evolving.

America’s Information Operational Technology Centre was created in 1998 to spy on actual and potential enemies, corrupt their digital networks, and even by controlling their computers. Its early operations were unimpressive. During the 1999 bombing of Kosovo, its geeks made Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic’s telephone ring incessantly, which seems merely to have annoyed him.

Before one anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Americans took down an Al Qaeda website, blocking the planned release of a propaganda broadcast by Osama bin Laden. Afterwards, however, counter-terrorist officers bitterly protested that all that had been achieved was to alert Al Qaeda to the vulnerability of its communications.

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Britain, Government, Iraq, Islamic State, Politics, Terrorism, United Nations, United States

The West has a responsibility in Iraq

mosul

Mosul: Violence in Iraq continues to escalate.

IRAQ

Intro: Recognising the huge human cost that the war is having on Iraq, we must accept and understand that we have an ongoing responsibility to help bring the bloodshed to an end.

Violence still engulfs Iraq. The United Nations has said that at least 6,878 Iraqi civilians were killed in 2016, a number that is most certain to be on the low side because of the unverifiable number of civilian deaths in war zones. And we do not know the full death toll from the ongoing fighting in that country because the Iraqi government has not published the causality figures for government troops and paramilitary forces fighting in Mosul and elsewhere in northern Iraq. It is a tragic toll.

In December alone, 109 civilians perished and 523 injured in Baghdad. These are largely attributed to Islamic State who have claimed responsibility for a string of bombings. But, as IS get shifted out of Mosul and other areas they have controlled, the bombings will only get worse. Fanatics will carry on the fight on the streets of the country’s cities.

Recognising the huge human cost that the war is having on Iraq, we must accept and understand that we have an ongoing responsibility to help bring the bloodshed to an end. Along with the United States we were at the forefront of the regime change invasion of Iraq that has unleashed such a violent insurrection since. Britain cannot be allowed to wash its hands as if now the mayhem has nothing to do with them. It does.

The conclusions of the Chilcot Inquiry found many failings of the UK but was specifically critical of the way in which the U.S. dismantled the security and intelligence apparatus of Saddam Hussein’s army, as well as describing the whole invasion as a strategic failure. Whilst the immediate violence is largely being perpetrated by IS and its fanatics, the West could have served the Iraqi people much better after getting involved.

It is always difficult to stand back and watch merciless dictators with no compunction committing butchery on their own people, but the long-term costs of not thinking through action from the start is now all too clear. Western intervention and the lack of proper military plans in Iraq – in dealing with all that has happened since that ill-fated invasion of 2003 – explains much of what we are witnessing now. Hideous incompetence.

A lesson we still seem not to have learnt in Syria.

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